pristine-deb – git-buildpackage’s pristine-tar support

Reading about the idea of pristine-deb, I actually noticed that using ar -rc file.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz does not work, due to timestamps and other differences.

I am currently working on a pristine-deb program which will workaround all these issues. It will be able to work with git repositories like pristine-tar and uses pristine-tar for control.tar.gz and data.tar.gz. I may also add a function to decompress all compressed files (like changelog.gz) and uses pristine-gz to compress this file again before adding it to the tarball. This may save some additional space.

BTW, git-buildpackage now supports pristine-tar. Simply enable it with “pristine-tar = True” in gbp.conf. Thank you Guido Guenther, for adding these patches.